When he’d stopped back by the precinct, he’d seen Rosa there at her cube, poring over the Mendez file. She had a desperate, angry look to her that he recognized from the mirror. He knew what she was thinking. How can a flesh and blood person just disappear? It’s not right.
He had walked over toward her and leaned on a desk nearby.
“Any developments?” he’d asked pointlessly.
She shook her head and looked up at him. Evelyn Rosa was a café au lait-skinned woman, with fifteen years on her and a bad attitude. She would have been beautiful but she was hard as granite, tough from growing up on the streets of the Bronx, tougher still from her years on the street as a cop. For all that steel in her, every once in a while, she’d come in with a bruise on her arm or the shadow of a shiner. Rumor was her live-in boyfriend of over ten years sometimes had too much to drink and they went at it. Apparently she gave as good as she got-most of the time.
“I hear you gave Alonzo a hard time today,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry. He got to me,” said Matt. “He really got to me.”
“He has that effect on people. I really hate that motherfucker.”
“You think he killed her?”
She nodded. “I think he killed her and doesn’t give a shit about it. But I’ve got no evidence. Nothing. And he’s all lawyered up now.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“He went home. He figures we’re looking for a corpse. No rush.”
She shrugged and couldn’t meet his eyes. He felt for her.
In his living room, he saw Rosa’s face again. Haunted, she’d looked haunted. He imagined that they were all getting that look about them, all of them that were carrying around the ultimate unanswered question. Where have they gone?
How are you supposed to live with this job? he wondered, as he flipped open the lid of the pizza box and scrolled through the channel guide on his digital cable with his other hand. He had the sound down and flashed through the images quickly: a guy pulling a huge marlin from crystal green waters, a woman crying by a fireplace looking beautiful and sad; a couple kissing.
Homicide, okay. The deed was done; your job was to find the perpetrator and bring justice. But Missing Persons, you had to find people who have dropped away from their lives. There was a terrible urgency at first and then when those intense thirty-six hours passed, slowly people moved away from it. When people started to get the sense that a person has fallen through one of the cracks in the universe, that when news does come, it will be bad, they start to distance themselves. Even cops did this, the good ones anyway, the effective ones. The sane ones. It probably helped if you had kids or something else important going on in your life. Those guys were able to keep the ones that never got found off the list of things that they thought about in bed at night. He hadn’t been able to do that. Not with Lily. He thought about her all the time, even when he was thinking about Rosario Mendez.
He flipped off the television and walked to the kitchen where he popped the lid off a Corona. There were two plates of dinner in the refrigerator for him and a note on the Formica table in the kitchen. “Eat!” it read. “Love, Mom!” He felt guilty for bringing home the pizza. She’d see the box when she came in to clean and her feelings would be hurt. He’d have to remember to take it out to the garbage can on the side of the house before he left in the morning.
He walked through his house and upstairs without turning on the lights. His row house was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust on the used furniture collected from his brother, his parents, his cousins. The only things he’d bought himself were the big-screen television in the living room that sat in front of a blue velour couch that had once belonged to one of his aunts, and the new desktop computer that sat on the old wood desk in the spare room upstairs, the desk on which, as a kid, he’d done his math homework. Up in his bedroom, he knew he’d find his laundry in neat piles on his bed, his shirts pressed and hanging in the closet.
Upstairs, he set the Corona on the desk, booted up the computer, and opened Lily’s file again. Maybe it was the fiftieth or the one-hundredth time he’d been through it. But he had new information now, information about The New Day, thanks to Lydia Strong. Maybe there was something he’d missed before. Maybe.
It took Jesamyn exactly one evening with Dylan to remember why they weren’t married anymore.
The three of them had shared a pepperoni pizza and then piled into Jesamyn’s Explorer, heading up to her apartment. They were all light, laughing, joking around like a normal, happy family. Once strapped into the backseat, Benjamin was asleep in under ten, emitting a funny little snore that had Dylan and Jesamyn giggling quietly.
“You wore him out,” she said with a smile, pulling onto the West Side Highway. There was a lot of traffic for the time of night and it was slow going as the river of traffic tried to squeeze past the construction she would swear had been going on for about fifteen years.
“He wore me out,” Dylan said with a light laugh. “The kid just has this boundless energy, a million questions.” He was quiet for a second, smiling to himself. Then, “I don’t know how you do it, Jez. On your own, full time. I know it’s hard.”
There was a heavy silence between them, populated by their regrets and all that had passed between them.
“I’m sorry it turned out like this,” he said finally.
She glanced over at him and quickly put her eyes back on the road. He was staring down at his fingernails, looking sad. A little too sad, something inside her whispered. He’s playing you. She didn’t say anything, just stared ahead of her. In their marriage together, she had always rushed to fill the silences. There was always too much talking, not enough listening. She sensed that he hadn’t said what he really wanted to say so she just kept quiet.
“Do you ever think about us? About if we could make it right again?” he asked her softly, putting a hand on her knee. She cursed her mutinous heart for fluttering.
“Don’t, Dylan,” she said. “Not now. Not with him in the car.”
Dylan’s cell phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket. She saw him glance at the caller ID and stuff it back in his pocket without answering.
“I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh. “You’re right. I just wanted you to know that I’ve been thinking about it.”
She couldn’t even look at him. Her heart was thumping and tears threatened but she held them back. She didn’t know what to think of him or how he was acting. He was kind, mature, thoughtful-all the things she’d wanted from him when they were together, all the things that had seemed so impossible for him. It just felt too good to be true. On the other hand, maybe the scare he’d had was a wake-up call for him.
She thought about this and they rode in silence the rest of the way back to the Upper West Side. Miraculously, she found a spot on the street and didn’t have to spring for a night in the garage. While she grabbed her bags and Ben’s from the trunk, Dylan was able to extract Ben from the backseat without waking him and carried him up the street.
“Did you talk to your PBA rep today?” she said quietly.
“Yeah, I did,” said Dylan, shifting Ben up a little. “He thinks it’s going to be okay. The shooting was good. I know it and everyone who was there that night knows it. I just have to go in and answer questions, so do the other guys. It’s still going to be a week without my weapon, at least.”
She put a hand on his arm. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. They both knew there weren’t any guarantees. If there was unrest in the community over the incident, or if there was some unspoken agenda to come down on white cops that shot black kids, or if he just got an unsympathetic investigator, things could go badly for him.